Top 10 Social SEO Posts of 2009

You don’t have to look far to find social media roundup posts this time of year. But what about the most effective one-two marketing punch for building community AND delivering conversions and ROI? Social Media and Search Engine Optimization – or “Social SEO” as we like to call it.

Out of the 300 or so posts published in 2009, I’ve picked the best of the year based on a mix of my own opinion and metrics such as comments, inbound links, pageviews and social engagement off the blog through social news, bookmarking, Twitter and similar services using PostRank.

Here are TopRank’s Top 10 Social SEO Posts of 2009. Enjoy!

#1. 25 Must Read Social Media Marketing Tips – After interviewing some of the top social media and marketing experts in the industry (Charlene Li, Chris Brogan, Brian Solis, Scott Monty and many others) I decided to take the best questions and answers from each interview and aggregate them into one post. The result is a 360 degree view of how to plan, approach and measure social media.
(40 Comments, 1,617 Tweets, 896 Links, 38,528 Pageviews, PostRank 8.3)

#2. Best and Worst Practices Social Media Marketing – Knowing that social media is increasingly intertwined with search engine optimization, this post compares the dramatic increase in interest in the social side of marketing and offers a mix of best practices and worst practices for readers in need of some social media demystification.
(Comments: 54, Tweets: 379, Links: 2,624, Pageviews: 20,810, PostRank: 5.0)

#3. 16 Rules For Social Media Optimization Revisited – Three years ago, Rohit Bhargava coined the phrase, “social media optimization” and wrote a post with 5 rules for SMO. I joined 3 other bloggers to expand that list to 16. Fast forward to 2009 and Adam Singer from TopRank revisted those original 16 rules to see which were valid and which were outdated. You may be surprised at the result.
(Comments: 16, Tweets: 486, Links: 249, Pageviews: 8,059, PostRank: 8.8)

#4. Social Media Marketing Tops Digital Marketing Tactics for 2009 – One of the useful applications of growing a blog community is the opportunity to tap into their opinions and provide insight into industry trends. This poll revealed that 6 of the top digital marketing tactics readers would emphasize were social media. SEO ranked number 3.
(Comments: 32, Tweets: 227, Links: 310, Pageviews: 10,867, PostRank: 5.0)

#5. Social Media and SEO: 5 Essential Steps to Success (Published on Mashable) – The intersection of search engine optimization and social media is often one sided. Social media practitioners see the relationship and community building benefits while many SEOs focus on promotion and link building benefits. This guest post on Mashable offers specific tips and examples of how to incorporate the best of both worlds: Social SEO.
(Comments: 56, Tweets: 784, Links: 1,094, Pageviews: , PostRank: 6.2)

#6. 50 Ways to FAIL On Twitter – This is pure and simple, linkbait. We fall more on the optimistic side of our editorial and content strategy, but I crowdsourced what NOT to do on Twitter via @leeodden and received some very strong opinions. Read this post as an optimist and reverse the tips and you have 50 things your SHOULD do to be more successful using Twitter.
(Comments: 53, Tweets: 698, Links: 381, Pageviews: 9,233, PostRank: 10.0)

#7. 10 Proven Applications For Social Media – With millions of self professed “social media experts” regurgitating a handful of original ideas, a vacuum exists for practical examples of what social media can mean to advance business goals. TopRank’s Adam Singer delivers in this post that includes end benefits ranging from PR to SEO to, well, I’ll let you read the post to find out. 🙂
(Comments: 22, Tweets: 839, Links: 214, Pageviews: 11,664, PostRank: 8.2)

#8. 5 Near Free Social Media Monitoring Tools – Effective social media and social SEO efforts begin and end (actually there is no “end” in social but you get the idea) with social media monitoring. Such tools can be difficult for marketing dollars strapped organizations to justify, so TopRank’ Michelle Bowles delivered with this review of 5 free and low cost tools. The stats on this post are amazing considering it ranks top ten for the year and was just published 2 weeks ago!
(Comments: 37, Tweets: 633, Links: 431, Pageviews: 4,246, PostRank: 9.1)

#9. 6 Social Search Engines to Start 2009– What better way to start 2009 than to compare the top social search engines? At the time, there was no “real time search” or deals between Google and Bing with Twitter or Facebook. Several of the social media search engines reviewed in this post have expanded a great deal and some have withered away into notgoingtohappen land.
(Comments: 38, Tweets: 27, Links: 677, Pageviews: 14,563, PostRank: 8.9)

#10. Social Media Marketing Basics: Facebook & Blog Promotion – “Build it and they will come” doesn’t work with SEO and it certainly isn’t effective with marketing on the social web. Research, planning strategy and building a social presence is important. But without content distribution channels and promotion, it can take a very long time to build a community or reach an effective level of momentum. This post gives specific advice for two of the most popular social applications in use.
(Comments 33, Tweets: 199, Links: 137, Pageviews: 4,680, PostRank: 8.5)

What were your favorite Social SEO blog posts in 2009? What social web and search engine optimization topics would you like to see more of in 2010?

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@LeeOdden is the CEO of TopRank Marketing and editor of Online Marketing Blog. Cited for his expertise by The Economist, Forbes and the Wall Street Journal, he's the author of the book Optimize and presents internationally on integrated content, search, social media and influencer marketing. When not at conferences, consulting, or working with his talented team, he's likely on a beach somewhere doing absolutely nothing.